]]>Those awkward couple of minutes that it takes for everyone to adjust their microphones and cameras on a video conference call? Vancouver-based ambient video startup Perch wants to do away with them.

“Teleconferencing as we know it today is a very heavy process,” Perch CEO Danny Robinson told me during a recent interview. Perch wants companies to instead embrace its low-maintenance, always-on, bring your own device video presence app, which it is getting ready to release for iOS this week.

Here is how Perch works: Offices simply install the app on an iPad and mount the iPad to the wall, at a spot that’s accessible to everyone. Then they connect it to a remote Perch-enabled office, something that’s called a portal in Perch lingo. Both iPads start streaming video right away, but won’t transmit any sound until the app detects a face looking straight into the camera.

For an admittedly very promotional demo, check out this video provided by Perch:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/71929407]

The facial detection is a big part of Perch’s pitch. Robinson told me that the app doesn’t want employees to feel like they’re being spied on, but instead give them the assurance that they’re in charge. “The goal was to make the technology feel polite,” he told me.

That notion also continues in Perch’s second use case, which is its very own take on video calling. Users can also install the app on their phone, and then dial into a portal.

The kicker: The person or office being called sees the caller’s live video feed even before they accept the call, but not the other way around. It’s kind of like looking through the peephole before you open a door, and Robinson described it as surprisingly disarming. After all, you don’t have to worry all that much about getting on a video call if you see that your boss is underdressed too.

Perch didn’t really start with business use in mind. The company began building an iOS-based security system, but changed course and embraced ambient video when it saw that its users talked to each other every day. Robinson told me that Perch still wants to encourage the use of its app in the home, but that it’s a bit tougher sell to get families to turn an iPad into a dedicated Perch device.

In the corporate world, on the other hand, this turns out to be a minor expense, with a potential big upside. Not only can companies replace formal teleconferences with more impromptu conversations, Perch could also help to break down boundaries between distributed teams. “It makes everybody feel connected,” said Robinson.

]]>Clay Spinuzzi, an associate professor of rhetoric (yes, rhetoric) at the University of Texas at Austin, took an interest in the area’s budding coworking movement just as it was getting off the ground in 2008. For three years he immersed himself in the community, speaking with space users and owners, studying written and electronic materials put out by spaces and generally trying to get a sense of what exactly coworkers were up to?

The results of that research were published recently in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication in the form of a long and quite academic article (light reading, it is not) that tackles the seemingly simple question: What is coworking, and what do people get out of it? But, it turns out, the lived reality of coworking is not as tidy as Spinuzzi’s straightforward question. He got a bewildering set of contradictory answers from space owners:

Coworking space as community center. The proprietors of Soma Vida and Space12, mixed use spaces, told Spinuzzi that coworking as they all understood it was all about serving the local community. “The object was to work alongside, but not with, others. Consequently, both had quiet policies in their spaces,” writes Spinuzzi.

Coworking as collaboration space. If some spaces were all about offering community members peace and quiet, others insisted they were focused on creating a buzzy environment. Calling this type “the unoffice,” Spinuzzi notes spaces in this category, which includes Brainstorm, Link, and Perch, “encouraged discussions; interaction between the coworkers.” Spinuzzi summarizes the object of these spaces as recreating “characteristics of the traditional office environment that independent workers may miss.”

Some proprietors in this category even ruled the community center type of space out of the coworking movement entirely. “If a space had a no talking policy, ‘then it’s not coworking,'” Link’s Liz Elam told Spinuzzi.

Coworking as networking hub. Conjunctured, Cospace and GoLab Austin, “saw the mission of their coworking spaces as fostering more active connections between coworkers, connections that could lead to working relationships between businesses—contracts or referrals,” writes Spinuzzi. “Their focus was on entrepreneurship.”

He notes that while these spaces were as buzzy as so-called unoffice spaces, they were more focused on formal collaboration rather than informal connections and saw themselves as catalyzing the shift towards more independent work by allowing independent workers to clump together. “Proprietors saw these spaces as comprising a collocated network of potential contractors,” concludes Spinuzzi.

That’s how proprietors thought of their spaces. What did the actual coworkers within them tell Spinuzzi? “The coworkers I interviewed tended to emphasize the unoffice model, in particular, the combination of space and social interaction,” he says, but notes that they were far from in complete agreement about what they hoped to get out of coworking. “Some coworkers expected to work in parallel whereas others expected to work in cooperation,” he writes, noting different expectations for collaboration at coworking spaces.

The Save as Draft feature allows users to save progress mid-way through editing a longer page, or have a colleague review their changes before they go live. Once a region has been saved as a draft, users can use the new preview feature to check out what the pages will look like on the site before committing to making any changes.

The new undo feature takes a snapshot of the region (including any images and file uploads) every time an edit is made. Hitting the “Undo” button reverts the page to the previous version; 15 undo levels are saved.

Perch costs £35 ($55 USD) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. You can try out a live demo here. Perch is written in PHP, and you’ll need a server running PHP5 or later. Existing users can find update instructions here.

Developer API — The API enables additional features to be added to Perch as apps, without adding bloat and complexity to the original lightweight product.

Dynamic pages — One of the first apps to be made available for Perch is dynamic pages, which allows you to add new pages to a site, an oft-requested feature.

Content filtering and reuse — It?s now easy to dynamically ?lter a multiple item region to show only items of interest, and content can be pulled from one part of a site and automatically displayed on another.

There’s a few other neat updates as well, like the ability to customize the interface with your own CSS and JavaScript, and improved image management.

Perch costs £35 ($51) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. You can try out a live demo here.

]]>This weekend saw the launch of Perch, an easy-to-use lightweight CMS put together by British web development agency edgeofmyseat.com. Perch is perfect for those situations where you would like to be able to set up a web site with some editable content regions for a client, but don’t want to have to install a full-blown CMS or try to hack a blogging system in order to do the job.

Installation is straightforward, although you do need to be a little tech-savvy to get it up and running. You’ll need a server running PHP5 or later. (Check if you’re using a shared host — I found mine was still running PHP4, but could flip to PHP5 easily.) Download the zip from the Perch web site, unzip, and FTP the Perch folder to your host. Run the setup script, insert your license key, and fill out your database login details. Most of the installation legwork is done for you, although you’ll need to FTP a generated configuration file back to the server.

To start using Perch to manage the content on your site, you first need to add some editable content regions into your pages using Perch tags. Once you’ve set up the regions, log in to your Perch control panel.

Perch’s interface is very clean and simple. There are just two tabs at the top of the page, “Content” and “Users”. Under “Content” you’ll find the regions that you added to your pages. Click on a region to initialize it by selecting a content template to use. Perch has templates for many types of content included out of the box (file, image, contact, text block, article and text), but you can create your own templates using simple markup.

If you’re building a site for a client, it’s now just a case of setting up user accounts for your client under the “Users” tab. (There are only two levels of access: “Admin” and “Editor”.) They’ll then be able to log into the control panel and edit the content as required.

Because Perch has a simple, clean and easy-to-use interface, it shouldn’t be too hard to train clients to use it, which makes it a good choice for web sites that have some changeable content but don’t require a full-blown CMS. Perch should also be a great choice if you want to retrofit some editable regions into an existing static web site. However, it is very stripped-down, so if you require, say, an inbuilt WYSIWYG editor, you’re going to need a more heavyweight solution like ExpressionEngine.

Perch costs £35 ($57) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial available, but you can download a Compatibility Test Suite to check that it will work on your setup before purchasing.